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What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes’s answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

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"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pevear and Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's classic novel that presents a clear insight into this astounding psychological thriller.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great anti-systematizers . . . All of Barthes work is an exploration the histrionic or ludic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, the point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure." --Susan Sontag

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

"The Pleasure of the Text," by Roland Barthes, is a work of literary and cultural philosophy that actually transcends the genre. The short book consists of a series of "meditations," many less than a page long, that explore various facets of language and reading. Barthes' work has been translated from French into an elegantly playful English by Richard Miller.As a whole, the book has an informal, almost stream-of-consciousness feel to it. Barthes' text is richly studded with numerous cultural references--Bataille, the Kama Sutra, Sade, Severo Sarduy, Marx, the Buddhist sangha, Poe, Chomsky, and much more. Barthes often uses sexual imagery as a vehicle by which to construct a philosophy of reading. The result of all these elements is a dizzying, yet oddly delightful reading experience.One of the key themes of "The Pleasure of the Text" is Barthes' attempt to define "pleasure" and "bliss," and to delineate the differences between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. From Barthes' project the close reader can thus derive a new way of looking at all texts.Among other topics Barthes considers the hierarchical nature and pleasure factor of the sentence, as well as the erotic potential of the word. And throughout, his writing is marked by passages of wit and insight. A typical observation: "The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition [...].""The Pleasure of the Text" often takes on a metaphysical, almost prophetic flavor. For those who are willing to dig into this dense text with gusto, it may prove to be an intellectual treasure heap.

Reading this long essay, I was reminded of Barthes' contention that he was not a literary critic--this work goes farther than most anything that passes for literary criticism nowadays. This is a beautiful, concise essay on what makes reading pleasurable, something most critics wouldn't dare to tackle. But Roland Barthes is no critic--he's a philosopher and a poet, a gifted writer whose words desire your reading (and you'll desire the words) as much as they illuminate that desire itself. It's a rare person who can explain literature while creating it. Barthes is one such person, which is just another reason he's no literary critic.

I returned to Barthes not having read him in a long time. A graduate TA, with shaky french herself,had us reading Mythologies in the early '80's. As students working hard just to translate the text, I'm afraid we let certain funny jokes, like the fact of a frenchman discussing the meaning of french fries in America,go directly over our heads.

I happened to read a review of a movie where Ben Kingsley romances college student Penelope Cruz.One detail, "She had under her arm, The Pleasure of the Text," reeled me in to order it, though I did not consider the movie any further(maybe that was wrong). I also ordered two others by Barthes. One was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, a short, easy enjoyable read I recommend.

Pleasure of the Text is a little more involved but certainly not impenetrable. I actually was finding it funnierand funnier until I got to page 9, where I laughed out loud as he talked about the "narrative" being "dismantled" in Flaubert. Maybe it was just me. On rereading it I realized it was not really a joke;I think Barthes is a little more serious here than in the french-fry book(some may say that was serious, too).In sum, definitely lovely, accessible writing. And he seems like a pretty nice guy after all these years.

If a pomo critic talks about modernism, its with a great sense of superiority; if a modernist talks about postmodernism, its either with a sense of exasperation or with a sense of discovery. I love Pleasure of the Text but I view it as a great piece of modernist poetry/literature. It was a subjectivity/sensibility steeped in modernist texts that produced such a text, that made such a text possible. But since then no postmodern text has really done anything nearly as interesting. I would argue that this is because postmodernism has argued literature out of existence. In Pleasure of the Text there is still a belief in the subject as a kind of center (an indefinable center but a center nonetheless) and what makes it interesting is that the subject enjoys being decentred, and its the subject himself doing the decentring (by reading texts that give him that desirable sensation).